ThinkingWithPortals.comPortal Mapping Community2018-05-09T08:11:05-04:00https://forums.thinking.withportals.com/feed.php?f&t&mode=news2018-05-09T08:11:05-04:00https://forums.thinking.withportals.com/viewtopic.php?t=10945&p=112072#p112072Today we have a fun announcement - the Half-Life 2 mapping community RunThinkShootLive is hosting a mapping contest called NostalgiaVille with some amazing prizes, and I want all of you to have a chance at winning. In addition to $600 in prize money, I am also offering up a one of a kind Combine Metro Cop helmet replica as an additional prize!

Half-Life 2 has been around for longer than 13 years, but many will agree that the game has still not lost its charm. NostalgiaVille seeks to balance out the scale by re-introducing the classic environments of Half-Life 2 in the modern day.

In this challenge, you are given 2 months to create a level set in the early chapters of Half-Life 2 (think City 17 up to and including the Coast, however we find that the City and Canal sections in their pre-Uprising state are the least prominent within usual challenge entries).

A big focus of NostalgiaVille is, well, Nostalgia. The player should be reminded of the time when they first played Half-Life 2, and levels should, to some degree, feel familiar.

We would like the early Half-Life 2 environments to be used and a level of familiarity in the level design to be kept, but gameplay can be either similar to the way it was in the original game or changed to add new concepts into the old environments, thus combining the new and old in your entry.

]]>2017-08-11T10:51:39-04:00https://forums.thinking.withportals.com/viewtopic.php?t=10767&p=111781#p111781And thank you to everyone who helped participants with mapping questions in the chats and threads. Also, thank you to our 7 judges who volunteered their time to play and score each of the submissions.It has been a fun competition with lots of streams to watch, and content getting created.

]]>2017-06-16T21:41:51-04:00https://forums.thinking.withportals.com/viewtopic.php?t=10726&p=111627#p111627The contest is running from Saturday, June 17 through Sunday, July 2Wednesday, July 5th. You've got 16 19 days to map!

Welcome back to ThinkingWithPortals!This contest is a follow-up to all our fun and successful Mapping Competitions in the past. The purpose of this event is to promote & reward people who are skilled in puzzle design and advanced map-making techniques. We anticipate this competition will be incentive for level designers to bring their A-Game to the Portal 2 community to enjoy. We also hope this encourages newcomers to the content-creation scene using the PTI to challenge themselves to make excellent content with Hammer.

This year to further encourage the creation process. We want to promote you if you stream your creation process. Jump into the TWP Discord Channel #2017_contest and Post a link to your YouTube or Twitch account when you stream. Feel free to also drop a link in the 2017 2017 Contest Streams, where we'll try to keep an up to date list of accounts who stream their map making.

The Rules are simple.Hammer made only maps, limited to 1 SP and 1 MP map.

Detailed rules below, don't try to cheese the rules:- Must use Hammer to complete entry. - Maps made with the PTI will not be accepted. - PTI/BEEMOD instances are allowed, however the level geometry must be designed wholly in hammer. - Maps exported from the PTI will be disqualified.- Entries must be fully mapped within the confines of the contest timeline. - Do not submit entries that you started working on before the contest. - You may update your entry up until the end of the contest. - The latest entry to the contest before the end timestamp will be used for judging.- No plagiarizing - Puzzle concept and map must be your own original creation.- Limit 1 Single Player and 1 Co-Op Map for contest.- There are no restrictions on style of your entry.- Group made maps will not be accepted, this is a solo competition.- There will be separate judged categories for prizes.- Judges may enter maps, but are disqualified from receiving prizes.

Submission instructions:- Upload Links to Workshop hosted entries HERE. Do not use this category for raw files, only for workshop links. (We are having trouble with our mirror hosting links at this time)- Alternatively, you can upload your compiled bsp and supporting files zipped up HERE for singleplayer, and HERE for multiplayer. Include #mappingcontest2017 in your description. (If possible, we suggest you use the workshop hosting.)

We will be awarding physical prizes, and Steam Keys to popular games.

TWP is BACK! Previous contests produced a huge number of amazing maps, and we are sure this contest will be no less! What are you waiting for? Get started!

]]>2017-05-06T09:44:37-04:00https://forums.thinking.withportals.com/viewtopic.php?t=10698&p=111399#p111399There are two main changes that our visitors can notice: 1.) The domain is now "thinking.withportals.com", with the extra DOT in there. I'll go in to why this is necessary in a little bit. And 2.) The site is now running on a TLS secure domain, which doesn't mean very much unless you are a stickler about privacy like I am.

As for why TWP went away and came back with a new weird domain, here's what happened.

In September 2015, the site went offline. There was an error with the company that handles my domain purchases, and although I did renew the domain and paid the fee, some how the domain still expired and was turned off.

When a domain expires it goes offline, but there is a short period where the owner can still renew it. Because of whatever happened, thinkingwithportals.com didn't enter this redemption period, and immediately expired.

It was then bought by a domain squatter - someone who buys domains just to buy them and/or extort people into paying for them - and there was nothing I could do about that. If I held any sort of copyright over the intellectual property I could possibly begin some sort of legal process... But since Portal is owned by Valve, I was pretty much shit out of luck.

I hoped that the domain would expire in 2016, but the squatters renewed it and so the domain sits on a parked page for another year.

So, why did the site come back?

ThinkingWithPortals, along with my personal website and a few others that I run, are sitting on a server that I own. This server started giving errors suggesting the drive would be dying - and I was not about to let 10 years of custom Portal maps die along with it. So I replaced the server's hard drive, reinstalled a new OS, and made a handful of other improvements. While I was doing this, I decided that I should try to bring ThinkingWithPortals back in some way.

It definitely wasn't easy. There is a lot of custom code that run behind the curtain to keep this site up in the fashion that it is. There are also about 300,000 links on the forum (in posts and signatures and whatnot) that all link to the old domain. Things like the 2012 Contest listings? Every link in that thread had to be updated. This process wasn't particularly time consuming or hard (I had some tools I wrote to help me) but I had to make 100% sure that every single reference to the old domain was fixed.

So that's pretty much the story. Will I ever get the old domain back? Possibly. I make damn sure to keep an eye on it when it comes time to renew. I would love if we did manage to get it back, but there's no way to know for sure. Will this new version be going away? No chance.